Lose weight, save a polar bear

When the last polar bear disappears off the face of the earth we’ll have one more place to lay the blame: fat people.

Sound far-fetched? Not if you agree with two researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine writing in the Lancet last week.

Their argument is that overweight and obese people stretch fuel supplies because both they and the great amount of food they eat demand more fuel to transport than people of normal weight do, thus leading to higher energy prices and food shortages.

According to their calculations, the researchers say the obese population eats 18 percent more calories a day than the normal weight population. And those calories are produced by an agriculture industry that relies heavily on biofuels.

What kind of burden does this place on the planet? Well, with approximately 1.6 billion overweight and at least 400 million obese adults lumbering around (according to the World Health Organization), quite a bit it seems.

The solution, as the researchers see it, is less reliance on cars and more walking and cycling. The results would be twofold: a decrease in use of the biofuels that contribute to global warming and an increase in physical activity leading to an improvement in health.

These conclusions are similar to those in a previous study in the Lancet which advocated changes in behavior and urban transportation policies to offset the harmful effects of our addiction to biofuels.